Watts up

Method actor: Naomi Watts learnt about grief from support groups for her role in 21 Grams, left.

One of Naomi Watts's gifts as an actress
is her vulnerable, almost inconsolable quality.

In her new film, 21 Grams, she
grieves and rages with frightening intensity and directness.

In one searing scene — the first one shot — she is told that her husband and two children have been killed in a car accident and it's as if she's been punctured.

It's a big, bold performance.

The film is a powerful fable about life and death, guilt and redemption. The title comes
from the weight the body loses at the moment
of death — according to one interpretation, it is the weight of the soul.

This becomes the central metaphor in a movie that Elvis Mitchell in The New York Times said plumbed depths of intimacy
so rarely explored that it was "tantamount to the discovery of a new country".

Not all critics have been as enthusiastic, but they have united in praise of the performances by Sean Penn, Benicio Del Toro and Watts.

Watts hadn't read the script when she took the role.

She had seen Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's debut feature, Amores Perros, about how a fatal car accident changes the lives of three people, and that was enough to convince her he was a director she wanted to work with, someone who knew how to handle emotion and tragedy.

She only found out later that she would be working with Penn and Del Toro. "I was like" — Watts's jaw drops and her eyes pop — "Oh my god, am I going to be able to do this?"

In contrast to her big-screen presence, Watts is impossibly tiny in person: so pale and delicate and fragile-looking.

She arrived 45 minutes late for the Sydney premiere of 21 Grams — not bad
for an actress of her stature, with Heath Ledger on her arm — and as she teetered down the theatre stairs in her high heels, arms akimbo, she looked more like a beautiful but gawky teenager than a well-respected 35-year-old actress.

She gave a speech of startling mundaneness that went little beyond "thanks for coming. Um, I'm really proud of this film. I hope, um, you enjoy it."

Like many actresses, she is, she later admits, inarticulate and uncomfortable in personal appearances. She is much happier in the guise of someone else.

I am surprised all over again when I arrive for the interview (Ledger, in dark sunglasses and a checked hat pulled low over his face, slinks past on my way in). Big-name actresses are nearly always running late (one kept me waiting while she put pink streaks
through her hair), but Watts arrives early.

Picture: Steve Baccon

There are clearly defined limits to what she will talk about (Ledger is definitely out of bounds, although I tried), but she still seems unarmed, somehow, as vulnerable off-screen as on.

Perhaps because she had to wait so long for it, she seems truly unaffected by her success, as if she's still struggling to believe in it herself.

But it is catching up with her. She used to be able to walk around her adopted hometown of Los Angeles in jeans or tracksuit pants and no makeup, and no one looked twice. But recently, when she was shopping, a security guard asked if he could have a word with her.

"And I was like, 'what do they think? Do they think I've done a Winona or something?'" But it was just after she had got back together with Ledger after their much-publicised
split, and the guard wanted to tell her there were six cars of photographers waiting outside.

"It was shocking to me. They stopped their cars in the middle of the street, stopping traffic, and just jumped out. There was, like, honestly 10 or 12 cameras and I'm just walking into a local cafe!

"It is truly, truly embarrassing. That's all it is. I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, but that's when you go, 'this is not natural.'"

She has witnessed worse, of course. She was there with Nicole Kidman, clutching her hand on the red carpet, after the split with Tom Cruise, and the intensity of the scrutiny put Watts off that level of fame.

"I don't know, maybe you have to build a thicker skin as you grow into it. But on the flip side of that, the whole point of being an actor is to have a thin skin so you can absorb everything and emote and feel and show that."

Watts strikes me as someone with a very thin skin indeed, and it is hard to fathom how she dredged up such a dark and damaged performance in 21 Grams.

"I found these grief support groups and I sat in on them," she explains. She formed a particularly strong relationship with a woman who had lost a child, and read her dairies, tracing the changes in her feelings over two years.

The rest comes from personal experience (her father died when she was nine), and a strange alchemy of objects with symbolic importance for her, and music.

"I was using Bjork on this one, because it's all from the gut and it's quite shrill and it's very, very emotional."

It was, of course, exhausting, having to rage and cry for weeks on end. Although there are many emotional climaxes in the film, Watts says they often went further than that, playing each scene in a variety of scalding ways.

It was a strong contrast to working with David Lynch on Mulholland Drive, when everything was much more muted and mysterious.

"David is the master of mystery, so nothing is said, even in the making of the film. Whereas with Alejandro we talked and talked and talked. Alejandro's very visceral and with David it's more cerebral."

She has a string of films coming out this year: The Assassination of Richard Nixon (again with Penn), Stay (with Ewan McGregor), I Heart Huckabee's (with Jude Law, Mark Wahlberg and Dustin Hoffman) and The Ring 2.

There's also We Don't Live Here Anymore, by the director of Praise, John Curran, which she co-produced and appears in alongside Mark Ruffalo, Laura Dern, and Peter Krause (from Six Feet Under).

You sense that she's been frantically capitalising on her success, all too aware that it might not linger. And no wonder, given her long and difficult journey to fame.

After being rejected by NIDA in her teens ("I didn't even get a call back, but I think my audition was probably crap") she enjoyed a spark of recognition in Australia with roles in Flirting and Brides of Christ, and the ad where she passed up a date with Tom Cruise in favour of mum's lamb roast.

Then there were wilderness years, when she bravely moved to Los Angeles, only to spend more than a decade having the hope leached out of her by films such as Children of the Corn IV and the TV movie The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer.

By the time she met Lynch, she was ground down, underconfident, and desperate.

But, like the gods of old, Lynch saw through this to something brilliant in Watts. He cast her in Mulholland Drive and she gave what The Guardian called "a top-notch, all-stops-out, bells-ringing, lights-flashing star performance".

Suddenly everyone else could see her brilliance too, and her years of perseverance were rewarded with triumph.

Apart from 21 Grams, she starred in The Ring and Le Divorce, and has been confirmed as the lead in Peter Jackson's upcoming remake of King Kong.

Is success all she hoped it would be? "Oh," she says, dismissively. "People say, 'you've arrived'. But you don't ever feel like that, consciously.

"I had a friend the other day who was like, 'Oh my god, you've done this and you've done that and you're working with Sean Penn, and you've got a movie that everybody's talking about'. And they spell it out, and you go, 'Oh wow, that is. . .' "

But she doesn't finish the sentence, as if she doesn't want to jinx her situation by calling it amazing, or great, or even pretty good: she is very superstitious.

"I just feel like me," she concludes. "The same old me."

But if she felt broken when she met Lynch, does she feel that success has mended her?

"It's very personal. You're very much exposing yourself all the time, and if it's not through your characters, it's yourself, doing things like this (interview). And it's difficult.

"You have to open yourself up to be judged, and that is heartbreaking, all the time. But I guess it's part of it. Some people are really good at it, and great at giving sound bytes. But I'm more shy, and it doesn't just come so easily."